4.7 Explore drill down - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Instructor>So in this sublesson,</v> we're gonna define what drill down is. We'll set up drill down on a visual and we're gonna use the line chart we created in a previous sublesson. And then we're going to understand what drill paths are. So let's go ahead and get our supporting Power BI desktop file open and give it a moment here. So let's go in now and interact with this visual and we're gonna turn our drill down, functionality down, but first let's actually show you how these visuals interact by default. So right now, if I clicked on 2019 here on this visualization, we're gonna see the other visuals just narrow their focus down to 2019 to show you what it looks like or what portion of 2019 is relative to the entire visualization itself. So I can do the same thing with 2020. Does that. (mouse clicking) Drives into things there. Okay. So now what if I actually want to drill down on this information? So what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to click this dot again, to remove the filters. And what I can do is there's this little arrow at the very top of the visualization called Click to turn on Drill down. So I'm just gonna go ahead and turn that on. And what we can do now is if I pick a point here, let's say 2019, and just click on it, and give it a moment, we can see that we're actually drilling ourselves down into the actual visualizations. (mouse clicking) Okay. So we can see here now that we drilled down into 2019. If I just go ahead and focus in on this visualization here, and what I'm going to do here is actually show you how to enable this focus. So this is another feature in the par via desktop is we've got this button right at the very top of the visual one as focus, that says focus. So I'm going to go ahead and click that and that's gonna move the visual into focus mode so we can see it a little larger and remove all the other visualizations. If I ever want to go back to it, I can click on this Back to Report. But let's go ahead and get ourselves back here because we want to focus on a couple of key things here. So we can see here now that the visuals drawing out properly, the only thing is now the X axis has all the months sorted in text order, which is not the way we want to have these sort of. We actually want to sort these according to the month number. So let's show you a very interesting feature here in power BI that lets you actually go and control the sort order here. So what I'm going to do here, is I'm actually going to go back to my data view. I'm gonna open up my order date table here. So I'm going to go ahead to my order date. I am going to go and find my order date month columns. So let's go ahead in here. So I'm going to click on the order date month, the one that is grayed out like so. And what I'm going to do is go up to the very top under column tools is click Sort by column. So I'm going to click on this and what I'm gonna say is, I want to take the order date month and I want to sort it by the month number of years. So if I scroll down this list here, I'm gonna see month number of year, and what that's going to do is allow the column that is called order date month, which is right here, which we can see as a text column with the three-letter abbreviation the month with a dash followed by the years. We're going to take this column and actually sort it by this columns values. So I did that at the data model level. So now any visuals that go ahead and use this, or using it in the future, will actually go ahead and sort things in this order. So now if I go back to my reports page like so, I should now see that the X axis is sorted in the correct order. So now, it goes from January, all the way through to December. And the really nice thing about that is that is actually something that is at the data model level. Okay. So maybe let's just go down one more level. So I'm going to click on June of 2019 here, and this takes us to all the individual days within June. So some really interesting things we can do here with our drilling. So I'm gonna go all the way back up, to the top here. And I'm going to go back to the report. The other things we want to show you here too are the ability to click these two arrows next to each other and say go to the next level in the hierarchy. So I'm going to go ahead and move this entire thing down one level. And I'm just going to put this back into focus mode here. And this takes us to all of the months and all of the year. So it took us down an entire level in our hierarchy. So let's just go ahead and move ourselves back up and leave us here. So now let's go to this next one, say let's expand everything down, one level of hierarchy. So if we go ahead and do that, we're gonna notice the visual looks slightly different because we've expanded everything down to one level. So a few different ways to go ahead and interact the really nice thing that we just want to show and expose here is once again, we can have visualizations on an overview page like this. They're are out of very high level and allow our users to drill and interact with the data as they see fit. The key things that really underpin this are two things. Number one is having data at the lowest level of detail possible in your actual data model itself. Number two is actually going ahead and building hierarchies that you can control as a developer for users to go ahead and use and help guide their analytics. So we've only used the order date hierarchy here. You also have one that is sitting on product, which we're actually not using in any of these sub lessons here, but you could actually go ahead and take advantage of that product hierarchy to control the drilling of information, the exact same way. All right, so that brings us to the end of the section here on drill down.